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Friday, September 27, 2013

As today is World Tourism Day, we felt it only apt to recognise one of the greatest benefits of learning languages, travelling the world.

The United Nations World Tourism Organisation has celebrated this day since 1980 despite the day being decided ten years earlier in 1970. World Tourism Day is all about raising awareness of global tourism and promoting the ways in which tourism improves the world. The benefits of global tourism can be seen in many elements of life, be they social, cultural, political, or economical.

Algorrobo, Chile. Sun, sea, sand, and,
most importantly, Spanish.

Over the years, World Tourism Day has had various themes, including world peace, development, education, job creation, ecological sustainability, tourism for sport, heritage preservation, and the tourism industry itself.

Aside from the aforementioned benefits, we can't ignore the huge benefits world tourism lends to learning languages. If, like us, you speak English as your mother tongue, then you will be more than familiar with being spoken to in English whilst on holiday. If you're in a particularly touristy area, then it's very likely that the reason the locals speak to you in English is because of the high level of tourism in the area, combined with the fact that many others in the world speak English as a lingua franca and that many native English speakers, particularly those from the US and the UK, are embarrassingly monolingual.

On one hand, you find that many of those who grow up in tourist areas have improved linguistic abilities compared to those who have not. On the other hand, many of those who have spent long periods of time abroad tend to have better linguistic abilities than those who have never left home.

So celebrate world tourism! Everybody deserves a good holiday, especially if you can learn languages doing it!

Monday, September 23, 2013

The Lingua File is delighted to have David Crystal as our guest contributor today as he tackles the question, "how to be an English language tourist?":

Hilary and I asked ourselves this question repeatedly when we were planning the tour that we eventually wrote up as Wordsmiths and Warriors: The English-Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain. Where can you find out about the places that influenced the character and study of the English language in Britain? How do you get there? And what do you find when you get there?
Places are often mentioned in textbooks and historical accounts, but you can get only so much out of such drab statements as 'the Anglo-Saxons arrived at Pegwell Bay in 449 AD', or 'King Alfred defeated the Danes at Edington in 878', or 'Dr Johnson compiled his dictionary in the attic of a house in Gough Square in London'. For textbook writers, that is usually the end of the story. For us, it was the beginning. What was that coastline like? What was the battlefield like? What was the attic like?

Pegwell Bay, Edington, Maldon, Lindisfarne, Lichfield, Stratford ... We went to over 50 places where something important happened. Most of the time, we found that the relevance of the language to the place had been forgotten - if it had ever been realised. But there are a few spots where it is remembered. There is even the occasional monument. Our favourite is the memorial to English dialect-writers in Rochdale, Lancashire. A runner-up is the huge monument to Bible-translator William Tyndale, in North Nibley in Gloucestershire - though 'runner-up' is perhaps not the best way of describing it, as it is is on the top of a hill which takes some climbing.

That's a point. If you want to be an English-language tourist, you have to be fit, or reasonably so, as some of the places where important things happened involve a bit of a walk, and sometimes over quite muddy and hilly countryside. So you should take boots too. But the outcome is always worth it. Even though I thought I knew some of the places very well, from my past reading and writing about the language, I was never prepared for what we found when we made the actual visit. The photographs often tell the story better than the words, and are an essential part of the narrative. It confirmed me in my feeling that the English language is not only diverse and fascinating, but unpredictable and exciting as well. For instance...

In Jarrow, up in the north-east of England, where Bede worked and wrote, we were not expecting to encounter a class of mini-monks all dressed in tiny habits. In Alloway, Scotland we were not expecting to see the worship of Scots national poet Robert Burns extend to his being portrayed in a mischievous re-creation of Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'. In Old St Pancras churchyard in London, we were not expecting to find piles of gravestones to be part of the story of pronunciation lexicographer John Walker. In York, we were not expecting to find the aftermath of lead-thieves, when we visited the places where Lindley Murray wrote his grammar.

With locations as far apart as the south-east of Kent and the Scottish lowlands, and from the west of Wales to the East Anglian coast, Hilary and I drove several thousand miles to compile what proved to be a somewhat unorthodox combination of English language history and travelogue. It was a hugely rewarding experience, though, which added a strong sense of place to our existing knowledge of language topics and personalities, and we strongly recommend doing the same sort of thing in your own locality, wherever you live, as a powerful way of making language study come alive. Field trips are not just for historians, geographers, and archaeologists. The English language lurks around every corner, in every country in the world, awaiting your call.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

You may be one of those who cringes at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe or a misspelled word. You may even dislike the spelling differences between American and British English; the sight of an extra ‘u’ (or lack of) in words such as colour or honour may cause you to shudder. But these are somewhat minor in comparison to other languages, which are yet to agree on a standard spelling at all. This is especially true for minority or endangered languages whose speakers may disagree on spelling for various reasons.

The example I present to you today is Cornish, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh and Breton. Many claim that the Cornish language died in the late 18th century along with its last native speaker, while others say it never died at all. It is at least agreed that Cornish certainly died as a widespread community language and so it has been undergoing a revival since the early 1900s.

Cornish is rather unique in that its dialects today are based on time rather than geographical location, the latter being the case for the majority of languages. This is because revivalists have chosen to base their versions of the language on various sources from different eras, namely from the 18th century, as it was last spoken natively, and from mediaeval manuscripts. Both varieties have different grammar, lexicons and of course, orthographies.

Cornwall, the historical home of the Cornish language.

But why was there any need to revive the language from the Middle Ages when it was spoken right up until the 18th century? Many revivalists saw the Cornish spoken in the 18th century to be so influenced by English that it was too impure, so they looked back for a ‘golden age’ of the language on which to base a revival. Mediaeval Cornish undoubtedly had far fewer English loanwords and was seen by many as being superior, whereas others believed the revival should be based on how Cornish was last spoken, to continue where the language left off, as it were. Because of these disagreements there have been a number of different varieties of spoken and written Cornish that have come out of the revival, each with their own supporting groups. Some orthographies for example make use of the letters C, Q, Z while others use only K and S respectively. We need only look at the various spellings for the language's name itself to see how much variation there has been over the years: We have Kernowek, Kernewek, Curnoack, Kernuack, Kernûak amongst several others. In English, many often get confused over which is the correct or appropriate spelling: grey or gray? In Cornish, we have had loes, lōs, loos and looz to disagree and scratch our heads over.

In recent years, the Cornish-speaking community has come to an agreement over a standard written form of the language, aptly named the Standard Written Form. Even within this official standard there are acceptable spelling differences: “A wodhes ta kewsel Kernewek?” and “A wodhes ta kowsel Kernowek?” are both acceptable ways to spell the Cornish for ‘can you speak Cornish?’. Even after the standardisation of the language, there is still some dispute amongst speakers and Cornish linguists on how the language should be written.Rhian Davies is a Language Policy & Planning student currently working on a website detailing the Brythonic languages.

Monday, September 16, 2013

With today being Grito de Dolores, the day marking the start of Mexican War of Independence, we'll be having a look at the languages spoken in Mexico. Grito de Dolores, meaning "the Cry of Dolores", was effectively a declaration, or pronunciamiento in Spanish.

It would take 11 years before this was signed.

The declaration was made in the small town of Dolores Hidalgo, which is now known as Dolores Hidalgo Cuna de la Independencia Nacional, meaning Dolores Hidalgo Cradle of National Independence. Dolores Hidalgo is now home to over 50,000 people, and though it is obviously not the capital of Mexico, that being Mexico City, it is incredibly important in Mexican history.

As you probably know, the Mexicans were fighting for independence from Spain. The Spaniards had brought many of their customs and conventions to the Mexico, including their language. Spanish is spoken by nearly 93% of the population of Mexico, but don't fool yourself into thinking Mexico is a linguistic wasteland.

Mexico is home to 68 indigenous languages, all of which are considered Amerindian. However, the classification of languages as Amerindian is somewhat controversial as this even includes various language families and even language isolates.

Mexico has the second-largest number of speakers of indigenous languages in the Americas after Peru. However, as a percentage of the population the figure appears surprisingly low.

The most widely-spoken of Mexico's indigenous languages is Nahuatl, which is spoken natively by more than a million Mexicans and 1.5 million people across the globe. Nahuatl was the language spoken by the Aztecs since around the 7th century.

Comalcalco, a Mayan archaeological site.

Yucatec Maya, known natively as Màaya t'àan, is a Mayan language spoken by over 700,000 people in Mexico. The Mayan languages were and are spoken by the Maya people who are generally distributed across southern Mexico and northern Central America.

Mexico's third-largest indigenous language, Mixtec, has around 400,000 speakers in Mexico, particularly in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero. Mixtec speakers can also be found in the American state of California, but in very low numbers.

Zapotec languages are spoken by just under half a million people and are found in a similar distribution to Mixtec languages. In addition to the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero, Zapotec languages are also spoken to some degree in the state of Veracruz.

There are of course many, many more languages in Mexico, far too many to have in today's post. However, we hope we've given you a quick idea of the linguistic landscape of one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the Americas.

Download
an Italian song (with some extra oomph) to your phone and set it as
an alarm for the morning.

11.)
Set a calendar appointment on your phone with an Italian phrase.

If
you’re like me (a time management junkie), you use your online
calendar to keep track of your life. Set a calendar appointment
daily/weekly for a phrase. Set an alarm reminder for it, and it will
pop up at that time, reminding you of the phrase and that you should
be learning Italian.

12.)
Choose one Italian podcast to listen to while you’re in the car,
taking a jog, or making dinner.

Cher
Hale is an instigator of adventure and romance on her blog The Iceberg Project, where she teaches people how to charm Italians with their own language and chase their wanderlust so they have always have a story worth telling.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

I am an interpreter. I show up to doctors appointments, high school graduations, business meetings, and college classrooms to interpret between American Sign Language and English. I often get the sense from onlookers and oglers that interpreting seems like a sexy, high-visibility high-stakes career for multilinguals. And it can be. I've interpreted for a professional mixed martial arts fight, and for one of the preeminent theoretical physicists who studies dark matter. But being an interpreter is more than flash. It's about riding the everyday Tilt-A-Whirl of language and trying to come out with your equilibrium in balance.

What is the interpreting field like? According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, there are currently about 50,000 – 58,000 interpreters and translators working in the United States. There are likely around 20,000 ASL interpreters, if we consider that the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf has 16,000 members, and certainly not all working interpreters are RID members. The field is expected to grow 43% by 2020 and with a purported average salary of $43,000, you might think this is a great place to make a living. What the statistics overlook, however, is that many interpreters – most that I know, anyway – don't work full time. Many interpreters are providing a second or supplementary income to a home with a higher-earning partner. Most interpreters also earn additional income by teaching or working in a complimentary field. Staff positions are desirable but rare, with most positions going to successful agencies, K-12 classrooms with main-streamed students, or housed within a disability services department at a college or university.

As for me, I have been interpreting since 2006 both full time and part time as graduate school has allowed. My associates degree was in interpreting, and I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. My current research is on immigration to the U.S., but my passion for language and culture has led to productive relationships with other interpreters and deaf individuals in graduate schools around the world. Like many service-oriented professions, a Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make me more qualified as an interpreter. But like other interpreters, I find myself trying to stay in good practice by interpreting part time. I also try to give back to the interpreting field by presenting workshops at conferences and writing as much as possible for working interpreters.

The economic portrait of interpreting doesn't do justice to the daily excitement and disappointments of interpreting. If linguists are the architects of language, then interpreters are the construction site managers, hammer and nails in hand trying to keep the structure from collapsing in the real-world environment. Roland Barthes' announcement in 1968 that the author is dead is no less true when the author is alive in front of you.

As an interpreter, I am faced with the constant challenge of trying to tell person B what person A said, even though half the time person A isn't really sure what they said, nor are they clear in their own mind what they want to say! On the one hand, formal equivalence between ASL and English is important. But on the other hand, I am always aware that such equivalence is impossible, or at least indeterminate. There are exciting moments when the people I'm interpreting for develop a relationship through my work, like the time I interpreted a bunch of jokes from a Deaf ASL teacher and her students. I left that assignment at the height of professional satisfaction. On the other hand, there are moments that are emotionally devastating, like the time I interpreted between deaf staff members at a school and construction workers. The two groups were clearly at odds with each other, and I doubt they would have resolved their differences even if they spoke (or signed) the same language. But that's what language is like in the world: it's messy, unpredictably unnerving, and unexpectedly gratifying.

And for all us who love language, that's what makes interpreting such a neat field and one worthy of our curiosity.

Austin Kocher is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. He has been involved with the deaf community since 2002 and has worked as an interpreter since 2006. He blogs at theinterpretingreport.wordpress.com.

Friday, September 6, 2013

If
you ever asked yourself what is it that makes language a language,
you have probably realized how difficult it may be to give an
appropriate answer to this question, even with the extensive
knowledge of sociolinguistics. Sometimes, a language and a dialect
are separated by a thin line that is often defined by some
extra-linguistic forces.

These extra-linguistic
forces are frequently related to political concepts of country and
nationality. Usually, the first feature that defines the language is
the country it is spoken in. However, being a living thing that
develops and progresses, a language cannot always be tied to a
precisely defined territory. This is the case with many regions in
Europe, for example, where the turbulent history caused many nations
to interrelate and merge in terms of culture and language alike.

How is the official
language chosen?

With the emergence of
the notion of ‘nation’, countries adopted different symbols of
their national identities. Besides flags, anthems, and coats of arms,
an official language is also an important feature that defines both
nation and country. However, problems appear in multicultural
surroundings and countries where many different languages and
dialects are regularly spoken. Recently, The Lingua File featured an
interesting article on the Languages of Bolivia, which pretty much
illustrates the point.

In such cases, the
official language is chosen based on the number of speakers, current
political climate and available funds (for reprinting all the
existing material). Therefore, choosing an official language is not
an easy decision, especially in some underdeveloped countries, in
Africa for example, where there are still separate tribes speaking
completely different languages.

Is language a
national property?

Different examples from
Europe prove that a language can be treated as a property emblematic
of a national identity, regardless of its linguistic features. This
is the case with Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, which share a lot of
linguistic features but are spoken within national borders of
different countries. ‘Appropriating’ language in this way further
poses challenges in terms of defining the features that actually
constitute a language.

Even more striking
example is the case with the languages of ex-Yugoslavia and
disassembling Serbo-Croatian to four ‘new’ national languages.
After the huge political transformation when the country got divided
into six smaller ones, national language was also divided and turned
into: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Clearly, these four
languages didn’t just emerge the same day the country disappeared.
They have always existed in the form of standardized registers, until
they were given a new status once the national territory was
reorganized.

When language is not
a language

To make this discussion
even more complex, there are some opposite examples when two
significantly different dialectal varieties are treated as the same
language, even though they are spoken in two different countries. An
example of this is Swiss German and its peculiar status in
Switzerland.

Namely, Swiss German is
regarded as an Alemannic dialect widely used across Switzerland and
some parts of Italy. The peculiarity is the fact that in Switzerland,
Swiss German is used on all levels of communication but it is still
treated like a dialectal variety, rather than a language. Instead,
the official language is Standard Swiss German, which has only few
areas of use. It is used in formal contexts, such as in educational
institutions, for official news and broadcasts.

Even though Swiss
German also encompasses a group of different dialects, it is unusual
that it has never been standardized in order to get a status of an
actual language, especially because it does have political
preconditions for this.

Obviously, defining a
language depends on multiple parameters. Due to frequent migrations
and redefinitions of national borders within Europe, this region
seems to be one of the most challenging areas for defining the notion
of a language. The examples given above make it clear that a language
is much more than set of linguistic features - it is a cultural
property and frequently a political tool.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

At this time of year, many students within the European Union will be starting what promises to be the best year of their lives. The ERASMUS programme, an international student exchange within the EU, enables students from Europe to experience other cultures, countries, and best of all, learn another language!

Le Pont d'Avignon, my old French stomping ground.

On a personal note, it was five years ago today that I started my ERASMUS year and like many, I was scared, apprehensive, and, above all, excited. I had initially been told that I would be spending my year in France living the typical Parisian lifestyle in the capital. Much to my chagrin, this was later changed to Avignon, a place I had never heard of and much farther away from northern France, where I had spent almost every family holiday.

Before even leaving the UK, I made a stupid error whereby I booked a flight for a Tuesday, thinking it was Monday. I showed up at the airport with a plane ticket for the following day, meaning I had to spend another £200 on a flight to Paris, and the best part of €100 on a train from Paris to Avignon. Thanks to arriving four hours late to the University, I missed the opening hours of the student accommodation office and was left to find a hotel when I should have been staying in the accommodation.

Though scared, nervous, and possessing a very poor level of spoken French, I showed up to the orientation meeting with all my belongings in tow. It quickly became apparent that every other ERASMUS student was scared and just as in need of meeting some new people.

Like anyone, it took some time to adjust, but by Christmas I had already met a wonderful group of people who would remain lifelong friends, learnt an incredible amount about French culture, and improved dramatically in French. The worries and apprehension I felt at the start were just a distant and somewhat ridiculous memory.

Needless to say, it was a wonderful experience. The remaining months through the spring and into the summer were just as incredible as the first few months, and though it was difficult to leave and many tears were shed, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

So for those about to embark on this journey, it should be noted that you are not the first people in the world to do this. People do survive and share an experience not just with those who are in the same town, city, or village, but with everyone who has ever spent a year abroad, ERASMUS or otherwise. You are incredibly lucky to have this opportunity and once you're finished with it, you'll do nothing but annoy your friends back home with all the stories that you can't bring yourself to stop telling.

You should take this time to stop worrying and start enjoying yourself. Just don't forget about the languages you can learn! It can be all too easy to stay within your comfort zone and speak in your mother tongue with others from the same country. Grab the opportunity with both hands!

Have you been on an ERASMUS year or will you be going soon? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below and please, keep it clean!